How has the West embraced water recycling? Very (gulp) cautiously

Sometime this fall, Mike Nivison plans to take a healthy swig of
water that exemplifies everything you'd expect from a small resort
town set high in a Western mountain range. The water will be cool,
clear, refreshing. But it won't be pristine spring water pouring
from some mossy crevice.

Nivison is Cloudcroft's village
administrator, and what he anticipates savoring will come from the
village's drinking-water treatment plant - and, not too long before
that, from its sewage treatment facility.

Cloudcroft's
will be one of the first wastewater systems in the nation to allow
- or require, depending on your perspective - residents to drink
treated wastewater that hasn't been naturally cleansed in a river
or aquifer. It will be built entirely as a matter of necessity. At
an elevation of more than 8,500 feet in southern New Mexico's
Sacramento Mountains, Cloudcroft is high and, thanks to recent
years of drought, dry.

"A city like San Diego can go buy
more water," says Bruce Thomson, a University of New Mexico civil
engineer who has been helping Cloudcroft develop its new water
system. "It's expensive, but they can. But Cloudcroft is simply out
of water. Because they're at the top of the mountain, there's no
new place to drill wells. They're at the top of the watershed. They
don't have any other alternatives."

Cloudcroft has only
about 750 residents, but its population swells to a few thousand on
summer weekends. All those people escaping the lowland heat - and
drinking, showering, and flushing - can use more than a third of a
million gallons of water on a single hot Saturday. But the
village's major wells produce only about 150,000 gallons a day. To
make up the shortfall, village officials have resorted in recent
years to hauling water, which is expensive, inconvenient and
energy-intensive.

Nivison figured that Cloudcroft's only
sure source of what he calls "wet water" - that is, usable liquid,
rather than theoretical legal rights or hard-to-reach water that
might be buried somewhere deep underground - was right at his feet,
in the stream of effluent pouring from the village's wastewater
treatment plant. With several million dollars in state funding and
the help of engineers from two universities and a private firm, the
village has been building a plant to purify that water. After
conventional treatments that settle solids and utilize microbes to
degrade or remove pathogens, the plant will use multiple filtration
methods, including reverse osmosis, to remove chemical
contaminants. Then the water will be sent to covered tanks and
mixed with groundwater pumped from the village wells.

After three or four weeks, the blend will be sent back through
drinking-water treatment and distributed for use. The wastes
squeezed out during the reverse osmosis process, meanwhile, will be
concentrated in briny effluent, which the village will store for
use in dust control on roads, fighting fires, and, possibly, for
making artificial snow at the local ski area.

And then
the toilets will flush, and the sinks and tubs will drain, and the
cycle will repeat again - and if Nivison and his collaborators are
lucky, no one will think much about it.

"By any parameter
you can measure - suspended particles, salts, bacteria,
pharmaceuticals - the water from this process is going to be
extraordinarily clean," Thomson says. "But you have to overcome the
'yuck factor.' It's not measurable, it's not quantifiable, but it's
every bit as important as the particles you can measure."

"All we've done is recycle the same water on this earth
since the beginning of time,"

Mike Nivison says. "This is
just a more controlled environment for doing the same thing. I do
believe this will be our salvation."

He's right, of
course: Using water is fundamentally a matter of recycling.
Mathematically, you can show that the liquid pouring from your
faucet today probably contains some of the same water molecules
that George Washington drank in 1776. Remember the water cycle
diagram you saw in grade school: Two hydrogen atoms bound to one of
oxygen precipitate from clouds as rain or snow, seep into the soil,
transpire from leaves, get lapped up by animals, course through
streams and rivers, and finally settle, temporarily, in the ocean,
only to evaporate once again to start the cycle anew. The idea of
reuse is central to our understanding of water - perhaps even a bit
compelling, when it comes to sharing molecules with George
Washington.

It's a good deal less so when you're talking
about wastewater of newer vintage, such as the stuff they're going
to be cleaning up and drinking in Cloudcroft. As the West grows in
population, though, and as climate change seems to be decreasing
the reliability of some water supplies, some of the region's
residents are reconsidering the notion that effluent is something
to get rid of as efficiently as possible. Only a few are willing to
go quite as far, yet, as Mike Nivison, but many are at least
embracing the idea that wastewater is a valuable resource. What's
happening in Cloudcroft, then, is a portent of what is happening,
and what likely will happen, in other arid places.

But the prospect of brewing your morning
coffee with water that was recently washing greasy dishes or
flushing a neighbor's toilet has many people uneasy, and not just
because of what psychologists and water engineers alike call the
"yuck factor." The water to be recycled may carry a host of
pollutants, some recognized only recently. Among the most worrisome
are endocrine disruptors, which pose potentially large but as yet
incompletely proven health threats that are making some scientists
very nervous.

Twice in the last 10 years, San
Diego city officials have proposed augmenting the city's drinking
watersupply with water reclaimed from the city's sewers
- and twice, in 1999 and again last year, those plans have been
shot down.

It is a telling comment on the disjointed
nature of much water management in the United States that San Diego
has both a water-supply and a water-disposal problem. On the supply
side, the city imports between 85 and 95 percent of its water from
distant sources - specifically, from the Colorado River and the
California State Water Project, which conveys water from Northern
California to the state's dry southern half. Those sources have
historically been reliable, but only up to a point. In 1991, during
a severe drought, water project deliveries were on the verge of
being drastically cut when the rains finally came; this year, water
planners are asking users to make voluntary cutbacks. And current
climate projections suggest that the flow of the already
over-allocated Colorado River may decline significantly in the
future.

For wastewater disposal, San Diego relies on a
water-treatment plant at Point Loma whose technology is antiquated.
It discharges effluent that does not meet Clean Water Act standards
into the Pacific. San Diego has a waiver from the federal
Environmental Protection Agency allowing it to dump that effluent,
but the waiver expires in 2008. The cost of upgrading the Point
Loma facility to meet EPA standards has been estimated at $1
billion, and the city has yet to make plans to raise that money.

As part of a settlement agreement stemming from a lawsuit
by the EPA and environmental groups, San Diego agreed to reduce its
effluent discharge into the ocean by building two plants to treat
water for reuse in the city and its surroundings. Those plants are
now capable of putting out 37.5 million gallons of reclaimed,
non-potable water a day.

Like many other municipalities
in the West, San Diego sells some of its reclaimed water to buyers
who use it to water golf courses, feed industrial processes, and
flush toilets. It's distributed in a network of purple pipes to
distinguish it from the potable water supply, and it's currently
available at about a third the cost of potable water. The trouble
is that the purple-pipe network amounts to an entirely new,
parallel water system, and San Diego, like many other cities,
hasn't extended it very far.

"It's expensive to pay for
the distribution of recycled water," says Maria Mariscal, senior
water resources specialist for the San Diego County Water
Authority. "Installing purple pipe in new developments is OK, but
retrofitting in established areas can be expensive."

As a
result, the city is able to sell only about a third of its recycled
water capacity and is unlikely to meet its target, developed as
part of the lawsuit settlement, of selling at least 50 percent by
2010.

To figure out how to use more of the reclaimed
water, the city Water Department conducted a study that recommended
treating it intensively and returning it to the potable water
system. The system would be like Cloudcroft's on steroids: 16
million gallons a day rather than 100,000. Using the treated water
to supplement San Diego's drinking-water system at a single point
would be much more cost-effective than piping the treated water to
an entire network of dispersed users of non-potable water.

Turning treated effluent into drinking water is a
widespread practice. It's most commonly done when communities dump
their effluent into streams and rivers, knowing that other users
downstream will use the same water. But an increasing number of
communities are reusing their own water. In Orange County, El Paso,
Tucson, and many other Western communities, water agencies recycle
by dumping treated effluent on the ground so that it can soak in
and recharge aquifers. After that water's been underground for a
while, it is then pumped up for drinking water use.

San
Diego's topography, though, doesn't lend itself to recharging water
from the treatment plants into local aquifers. So planners proposed
pumping the treated effluent into a reservoir that feeds the city's
drinking water system. The city council's Natural Resources and
Culture Committee agreed and forwarded the proposal to the full
council. A wide range of stakeholders on a community panel agreed,
too.

"To me, this is a win-win," says Bruce Reznik,
executive director of San Diego Coastkeeper, an environmental group
that monitors coastal pollution. "You're discharging less into the
ocean, and you're creating a local water supply that you otherwise
wouldn't have."

But opponents exploded, labeling the idea
with a visceral and unforgettable moniker of the sort no politician
can afford to ignore. "Your golden retriever may drink out of the
toilet with no ill effects," editorialized the San Diego
Union-Tribune under the headline "Yuck!". "But that
doesn't mean humans should do the same. San Diego's infamous
'toilet to tap' plan is back once again, courtesy of Water
Department bureaucrats who are prodding the City Council to adopt
this very costly boondoggle."

Mayor Jerry Sanders came to
much the same conclusion, announcing in July of last year that he
would not support the reservoir augmentation plan. A year later,
the City Council has yet to decide on any new wastewater reuse
strategies.

"It was certainly disappointing," says Jim
Crook, a consultant who helped draft California's water-reuse
guidelines in the 1970s and served on an independent task force
evaluating the city's proposal. "It was a good project from a
technical standpoint. We were very comfortable with what they were
going to do. The reclaimed water would be of a higher quality than
some of the raw water sources that are used now."

That,
indeed, is one of the principal ironies here: Before it could even
be used for reservoir augmentation, the water would be treated to a
higher standard than what San Diegans are drinking now. Water
discharged from the North City facility has already been shown to
be at least as clean as water in some of the city's reservoirs. If
it were to be dedicated to potable reuse, it would be subjected to
further intensive treatment, such as reverse osmosis, before being
pumped to the reservoir.

Reverse osmosis uses pressure to
force water through a membrane that allows water, but not most
other molecules, to pass through. It's expensive and
energy-intensive, but it is better than almost any other technology
at taking almost all contaminants out of water. Using it would
bring San Diego's erstwhile wastewater up to a much better quality
than, say, the Colorado River, which receives the waste from
hundreds of municipalities and industrial users by the time it
reaches Southern California. Las Vegas alone discharges roughly 60
billion gallons of wastewater a year some miles upstream of its own
water intake - a feat of urban engineering that would seem to prove
that most of what happens in Vegas really does stay there. What
happens in Sin City is fueled by prescription and over-the-counter
pharmaceuticals, caffeine, sunscreen, synthetic compounds used in
plastics and detergents, and even methamphetamines, say researchers
who have found all that in Lake Mead's water.

More from Water

It seems to me the dike is full of holes.
Eliminating endocrine disrupters from our drinking water would help
but would do very little to save us all from ill health. The goal
should be to eradicate all the pollutants in the environment that
would cause ill health. Or science needs to develope something to
make us immune to those contaminants which are present.

Anonymous

Sep 24, 2007 12:05 PM

Nearly every municipality in the region is
recycling their human waste ... many will reconsume their own
effluent and/or mix it with their fresh water supplies including
groundwater. There is a great deal that the scientific
community does not know with regard to the trace
quantities of herbicides, pesticides, hormones, drugs, viruses and
prions that will
eventually show up due to system
failures and gradual
contamination.

I doubt that many people are aware that prions are
probably not destroyed with current water treatment
methods. They may be aware of mad cow
disease, scapes, kuru, FFI, GSSS and CJD...
all are prions. All known prion diseases,
collectively called transmissible spongiform
encephalopathies (TSEs), are untreatable and fatal
!

Prions can be
denatured by subjecting them to a temperatures of 134 degrees
Celsius for 18 minutes in a pressurised steam
autoclave.

Sometimes a scientific
discovery shakes the confidence of scientists, making them question
whether they truly understand nature's "ground
rules." I found no current regulations, at least
at the Federal level, that prohibit pathology laboratories or
mortuaries from disposing of prion-contaminated tissue and fluids
of CJ Disease patients into the sanitary sewer. It appears
that currently, no validated analytical methodologies are available
for the determination of prions in municipal wastewater influent,
treated municipal wastewater effluent, or in biosolids.

I have offered CA,
UT, AZ & NV a fresh water Source of one million
acre feet annually for investigation. The Source
is legally, physically, economically and environmentally feasible
to develop without damage to anyone's water rights,
anywhere !

Pure water is produced by distillation in nature,
aboard ships and in the lab. How many of us distilled a
potassium permanganate solution in Chemistry lab as a
demonstration of the distillation process? It may be very
expensive and require management of high salinity effluent, but the
expense and complicated engineering and biochemistry may be
necessary for survival.

Other countries have
recognized the viability of saltwater
conversion.Israel’s Ashkelon
Desalination Plant is the world's largest that
provides for the annual water consumption of a population
of 1.4 million. According to Google
search, Saudi Arabia has 30 desalination
plants, which provide 70% of the Kingdom’s present
drinking water needs, and several new plants are under
construction. We
need to make a commitment and budget at local, state and federal
levels for seawater conversion plants. San Diego could
eventually supply Arizona with pure water instead of arguing about
Colorado River Water!

Anonymous

Oct 30, 2007 04:25 PM

We need a sustainable solution to the
problem of polution. Drinking endocrine disrupters is not
the answer unless they help prevent population growth.
Replumb our recycled sewage water into a system used for just that
purpose--flushing our sewage. How many gallons of water
are used during a ball game at the stadiums? How many
gallons are used in all institutional settings such as schools,
convention centers, hotels? All those toilets could be
hooked up to a recycled sewage system. Why do we continue
to irrigate our parks, golf courses, and residential landscacpes
with fresh water. The answer is gray water
systems. Every laundromat should be subsidised to help
purchase water saving machines. Educate the mainstream
population on how much water it takes to wash those super bath
sized towels. Encourage our engineers to build self
containing water reclamation systems for hotels and residential
use. I would buy one. Flush our toilets with
our bath water. Encourage builders to incorporate
technology to save water.

I know the
metropolitan water district wants to sell gallon and gallons of
water as do the builders of desalination plants. Saudi
Arabia has no other solution and has the wealth to support this
expense as well as a disregard for the environment.
Please, please, please put on your thinking caps and stop throwing
around the political football. This water obsession will
be everyone's worst nightmare.